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Undemocratic, say Left parties

Special Correspondent

`A reminder of the black days of the Emergency'

JAIPUR: The Left parties and activist groups have strongly reacted to the Rajasthan High Court order of doing away with elections to the student unions and the associations of the teaching and non-teaching staff in the universities and colleges. The court order was violative of the citizens' democratic rights and reminded them of the black days of the Emergency, they charged.

The State Secretariat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) on Friday asked the Government to move an appeal in the Supreme Court against the High Court order. The party's trade union, CITU, in a statement here termed the court decision "grossly undemocratic''.

Expressing concern over the court's directives to the State Government, the CPI (M) Secretariat noted that ever since the advent of the policies of liberalisation there had been a steady decline in the Constitutional rights of labourers, workers and other sections of society. "This is not a good indication,'' the party secretary, Vasudev, observed.

In a joint statement, Hetram Beniwal and Ravindra Shukla, president and secretary respectively of CITU, said the present court order was not in tune with the orders given, of late, by the Supreme Court. While sharing the concern of the Rajasthan High Court over the decline in the educational standards in the State, the CITU leaders blamed the privatisation and commercialisation of education for the lowering of the quality education.

The Rajasthan People's Union for Civil Liberties also expressed concern over the prospects of curtailment of citizens' rights in the wake of the court order. "The order amounts to violation of the right to set up organizations. A ban on holding elections to staff bodies is indirectly an order against the right to organize,'' the PUCL president, Than Singh, and general secretary, Kavita Srivastava, said.

The PUCL statement said if the election process was causing law and order problems or leading to misuse of money, the courts could have given adequate directives to check them. Going by the current logic, elections to the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies could also be done away with, it said.

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